Hacker News Reader

It's an excellent idea, because if the font fails to load you get an actual human-readable fallback, instead of "whatever some random other font put in the PUA". For example, whenever I visit GitHub I find the interface decorated with random Korean glyphs and 7-segment-LCD symbols, which is somewhat distracting and confusing. With a ligature system like this, I'd see things like "file" and "folder" which at least make sense.

View on HN

What are the benefits of having to supply a custom font instead of a custom icon?

edit: looking at it more closely, you'd have to specify the font just for the icon you want to use - if you used it for text, the ligatures would screw you up in short order. Try typing the word 'tileset' or 'padlock' in the box, for example. So if you're going to specify a font only for icons... why not just use the icon image alt text for screenreaders? (as suggested below)

A cute idea, but not sure of the pragmatic applications.

Except they only-sort-of match the text. Like using 'in' instead of login.

It all depends on usage. If you're using it next to text, then getting "Login Login" is annoying. If you're using icons only (which has debatable standards), then yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com